The invention generally relates to the field of educational electronic devices. In particular, one embodiment of the invention relates to method and electronic device for interactively guiding a user through proper handwriting or drawings techniques.
Over the past decade, educators an parents have relied more and more on supplemental teaching tools. One of these supplemental teaching tools involves educational software that displays alphanumeric text (e.g., characters and numbers) on a monitor screen of the computer, requiring a user to reproduce the displayed text on paper at a separate writing area. This supplemental teaching tool has a number of disadvantages.
For instance, there is a distal disparity from the monitor screen where the text is displayed to the writing area. For children learning to write, this may cause learning difficulties by continually forcing the child to write the displayed text from memory. Another disadvantage with the supplemental teaching tool described above is that it is not interactive, and thus, fails to provide a mechanism for guiding the user in reproducing the displayed text. Such guidance would be useful in teaching proper handwriting techniques and would enable users to learn to draw images with higher degrees of complexity than simple alphanumeric text.
In effort to overcome some of the above-stated disadvantages, companies have previously developed a computer peripheral tablet that features a 9xc3x979 matrix grid of light emitting diodes (LEDs). In response to computer control signals, certain LEDs are illuminated to display a selected letter or number. This enables the user to reproduce the letter by writing on paper situated at a separate, non-interactive writing area of the tablet, but in close proximity to the displayed text or image. Unfortunately, the LED grid again fails to provide an interactive, handwriting or drawing mechanism that guides the user in reproducing the displayed text or image. Also, the use of grids cannot clearly convey to the user proper curvature found in some alphanumeric text especially cursive handwriting and images.